Tom Miller's last day at the Portland Bureau of Transportation was last Monday. He left behind a budget and an accompanying "business plan" for the bureau.Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian

Just a day into his term as Portland’s newest mayor, Charlie Hales asked the
Transportation Bureau's director, Tom Miller, to resign and launched a
national search for a replacement.

Miller’s
resignation was made official last Monday. But before leaving office he
presented a proposed budget along with a “Business Plan” for the
upcoming fiscal year.

The
30-page, graphic-filled plan, which was mentioned in the budget and
obtained by The Oregonian through a records request, comes at an
interesting time. Late last month, the Portland City Auditor released a
report on the bureau -- and the findings weren’t great.

Portland Transportation Bureau has too many goals, not enough money to meet them and no rules about what comes first.

"Taken
together, the projects in these plans and policies have costs far in
excess of all available transportation revenues," the audit found.
"However the plans and policies do not rank or weigh the trade-offs
between various alternatives."

The
report ultimately called on the City Council to adopt a "transportation
strategy" that clearly spelled out goals for the bureau.

It’s
not clear whether Miller’s last act as director will be any sort of
blueprint for that strategy or something that is ultimately discarded
under new leadership. But it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

The
plan, according to the introduction, "spotlights the Bureau’s most
critical or timely strategic and ongoing actions in the next year." In
particular, it calls out five areas: Improve transportation safety,
maintain transportation assets, enhance public health and community
livability, support economic vitality and operate efficiently and
effectively.

Each
area has its own performance measures. With transportation safety, for
example, one of the measures is the total number of serious, incapacitating
traffic injuries and fatalities city wide. For maintaining assets, the
percent of streets in "fair" or better condition is one of the measures.

The documents is sometimes self-congratulatory and includes a number of highlighted "recent achievements" and "ongoing actions."

"Maintenance
integrated the use of rubber/polymer additives and high-strengthening
composite grids into the streets pavement program to increase resistance
to rutting and reflective cracking, thereby increasing the paving
surface lifespan by 30 percent, reducing ongoing maintenance costs and
decreasing overall lifecycle costs," the plan notes.

Still,
the report doesn't address any sort of funding hierarchy for the
Transportation Bureau’s many plans and investments. If anything, it
appears the document could be used to justify spending in a number of areas as a
top priority.

Last
Monday, the day Miller resigned, Hales took all of the city’s bureaus
under his portfolio during a budgeting process, which will stretch into
May. When the auditors report was released, Josh Alpert, one of Hales'
policy directors, said they too had heard the bureau was spread too
thin.

"This
is something that we've been hearing for a while now, that the
Transportation Bureau has some financial issues," Alpert said.
"Certainly the audit will be very useful in assisting the mayor and PBOT
leadership in refocusing."

However, at the time Alpert said he couldn't detail a transportation strategy yet.*